The BEST Tools To Get More Out Of Your Social Marketing.

Everyday, online marketing strategies and methods are developed that help small businesses drive targeted traffic and generate sales.

Savvy businesses use a combination of content production, email marketing, SEO and social media marketing, to get high rankings and build engaged audiences. The combination of these channels delivers an insane ROI, but every platform has its unique quirks, language and preferred practices.

Attempting to juggle the use of these channels manually, can be overwhelming.

Not knowing which platform to post on at what time, or even which type of content to use can quickly lead to confusion and burnout. Don’t despair, there are many tools on the market that just help you take the edge off. From helping you find extremely targeted prospects to easy content creation, these tools help with your most valuable commodity, TIME.

Below are some of our favourite tools to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts:

with the newly redesigned interface, Twitter is slowly edging in on Facebook as the social media network for marketers and businesses who want to communicate with clients and delivering customer service. A report by Mediabistro reported that 67% of Twitter users are far more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter. But how can you sell to them if you don’t even know where they are?

Cue the use of FollowerWonk. This is an app you can use to accurately segment your potential target market. You can also find thought leaders in your industry using this tool. NeedTagger is another Twitter data mining tool. This allows you to search Twitter for customers that are ‘talking’ about your business. You can drill as deep as by location, gender, age etc. Knowing who you ideal customer is will allow you create content that resonates with them.

On FACEBOOK.

Not sure what kind of information to post on your Facebook page? ShareGrab searches Facebook pages for highly-shared content. With presets telling the app the kind of info and topics that you are interested in, ShareGrab will grade the content based on how ‘viral’ its going. You can now pick the best performing content and model your posts after it or even simply share the posts if you feel it will be useful to your audience.

This amazing ‘telescope’ into what your audience loves to consume is absolutely free to use. The flip side is that you can also use ShareGrab to see which content DOESN’T work.

On PINTEREST.

Are you Pinning yet? You should be. Pinterest has one of the longest time-on-site metrics of any social media platform; 14.2 minutes per visit! And with over 70 million users, you have a really large audience to cater to. Excited yet?

How would you like to effortlessly tap into this pool of prospects? Introducing ShareRoot. This is a suite of tools that lets you manage content on Pinterest whilst driving engagement. You can use it to schedule pins, create board covers, set up & run contests and even monitor your board analytics. It also has a neat feature where you can create a Pinterest tab for Facebook and thus convert your Facebook fans to Pinterest followers.

Tools to help manage and improve your social media marketing are a dime a dozen. Knowing which ones that are easiest to use and still save you time is worth its weight in gold. Join us next week for our top picks of tools to use on Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms.

If you still haven’t chosen which platforms to work on, let Search and More help you. With accurate customer research, targeting and marketing, let us help your business and watch your income shoot up.

On INSTAGRAM.

Instagram is a great way to get in front of your audience if your offers are mobile-based. With over 80 million users, you can get your product in front of many prospective buyers. Photo-based social media sites allow people to share cool stuff they find. Businesses are taking advantage of this by producing engaging content that their customers will enjoy learning, but in picture form. Some ways include use for brand promotion, behind the scenes production of the product, seeing the products in action etc.

One popular tool for boosting your reach via Instagram includes Statigram. This app allows you manage your community, analyse their activity, let’s you know which pictures are popular & receive the most shares and engage with them. It’s a popular tool used by over 100,000 brands.

Another is Search Instagram, which allows you to search Instagram for images. This helps you find the most relevant images for your industry. A cool tip is to hover over the images in the search results and see their popularity.

On LINKEDIN.

The use of LinkedIn as a social network is a new concept to many small businesses. But with it’s growth to become the third fastest growing social network and the launch of the LinkedIn Influencer program, this platform can be used to increase your bottom line.

Using LinkedIn’s own advanced search capabilities, small businesses can find the kind of companies they want to connect with. This allows you foster business relationships by building Groups and growing your brand through word of mouth. A third party app to boost the reach of this is Ofunnel. This tool allows you to connect with new people, by alerting you when someone in your network connects with someone new.

On YOUTUBE.

Humans respond better to visual images better than words. That is fact is because our brains process visuals 50, 000 times more than words. I guess that is the reason there are over six billion hours of video watched every 24 hours on YouTube.

Let’s face it, the chances of you producing a video that will go viral are slim to none, but with proper planning and marketing, you can achieve phenomenal results with video marketing.
The first step is to determine your reasons for creating videos. Are you going to be teaching or entertaining viewers? Are you focused on trying to attract new visitors to your business site?

Use keyword tools like the YouTube Keyword Suggestion tool to find low competition keywords that relate to your industry. You can also use the tool to generate content ideas for blog posts and even more videos.

You can use the keywords found in your video titles to optimize them for the search engines. Ensure the keywords are placed in a reader friendly format to increase your click-throughs. While you may be tempted to attempt to rank for “Oulse XYZ Demo”, it makes more sense title the video “How to Save Money using the Oulse XYZ”.

Not comfortable on camera? While it is necessary for longer videos, there are many awesome tools that you can use to create short videos that inform viewers and link back to your site. Animoto, PowToon, Xtranormal are three tools to create catchy and unique videos for your business.

Video done and dusted? You can use HandBrake to convert and compress the video to a size that you can upload to YouTube with ease.

These tools can help you market your small business across multiple platforms. Most of them are available on a freemium basis meaning you don’t incur any more marketing costs, at least while you see if the product works for you. The question is, do you have time to learn how they all work? Let Search and More help you create a marketing plan for your business.